Ride

"Ride" drummers.

There's this interesting film called The Wages of Fear (French, Le Salaire de la peur). These chaps who hire a few derelicts and nowhere-men to drive a consignment of nitroglycerine across The Andes. When I watched it as a boy at Plaza theatre in Bangalore, it scared the heck out of me - I really was paid the wages of fear.



It's a film filled with tremendous suspense, with fear being amplified to crazy heights. People say it's a sermon on the evils of capitalism........I don't care one way or another, I just like the suspense. Would like to watch it again. They don't make films like that anymore..........

Some drummers like the beautiful sound of wood drumstick tips hitting a steel cymbal...... driving the rhythm along. Maybe it's plastic tips......even better. That tinkle has a full, mature, metallic sound.

Every once in a while it's therapeutic and life-giving to think of the things that AREN'T "riding" the world. Songs like The Eagles' "You Never Cry Like a Lover" from the On The Border album. Written by John David Souther, it's a song filled with satisfying little moments - piano-driven, typical Souther-chord structure (and typically with Souther, an aimless, pointless, empty song done with great deliberation), a very potent minor chord-sequence bridge, with a beautiful, wailing, melodic lead guitar (this was before the days of Felder and Walsh). I like the fact that "You Never Cry Like a Lover" will never ever show up in The Best of Eagles or even any fan-greatest-hits-lists. You know, while we were looking at the parade, a gem passed by in the dust.



Not every drummer rides. And not every song needs a ride. It is somewhat of a particular pleasure:)

Like a rich vein of dark green, glistening hornblende in pegmatite.....or even in regular-grain granite. When geology was the muse, I searched in vain for hornblende....everyone else was after the galena (oh, how it glitters) or the garnets (how they sparkle!). No one wanted the hornblende because actually no one had ever heard of it except as inseperable from granite.


To this day, I have never actually seen a hornblende crystal........and I still hope. To me, it was always the nugget of life, darkly lovely, hidden away in a glittering bed of other minerals. Minerals, of course, are identified by the colour of the streak they leave behind when rubbed on a porcelain streak plate. If life was indeed just a mineral, it would have an obscure streak.

Listen to Ringo ride in "Let It Be" - that tinkle is such a pure, pure sound :)

In 1962, Sam Peckinpah made this beautiful film called Ride The High Country. This was before The Wild Bunch and he still hadn't latched on to the lucre of gore - this was a controlled, loving thing about two ageing gunmen, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott (oh, how I love this film!!!!) Along the way, the West as it really was in an age gone by, is shown quite accurately.



One of the triumphs of the film is its seemingly incidental portrait of a Wild West gone by. Of course everyone now only remembers the bloodshed of The Wild Bunch.......I haven't even seen The Wild Bunch and I'm immensely glad. I only know Sam of Ride The High Country.

Ride drummers. Particular pleasures. Not by everyone, for everyone or of everyone........